Destiny 2 has become a Microtransaction Hell
Destiny 2 has become a Microtransaction Hell
Bungie has turned Destiny 2 into a Microtransaction Hell. Today we'll be looking at Destiny 1, the current state of Destiny 2 Silver, Eververse, Pay to Win, ...
The last time I played Destiny 2 was when Cayde-6 was killed. Then comes the trailer for the new DLC and I got hyped. Wanted to replay the whole story to get up to speed with it, but what I saw is a massive joke. You can't play older content anymore, even if you have bought it, because Bungie decided to COMPLETELY REMOVE it.
I even created a new character and got thrown into that old tutorial, but every time I logged out and back in, I got a whole ass other intro sequences. First, it was when the Traveler rose up into space, then, after my third login, that bad guy was inside the Traveler or whatever and I had to go to Mars and dive down to that whale thingy.
After that, I just uninstalled it. If Bungie does not give a shit about new or returning players, then I don't give a shit about them.
Destiny was a beautiful game until the Taken King. The original enemies and map design made replaying strikes not a hardship, and while the Taken King had new enemy types, it didn't completely lose the plot.
Basically everything since D2 launched is worse. The levels don't have the same attention to detail, the maps and worldbuilding all feel super generic, and they just churn through the same guns and armor with minor perk changes to take away old ones and lock you into a treadmill, with a grind that's not fun because the content feels like shit they threw against the wall.
Then they take away shit you paid for. I bought the original game happily, and was mildly disappointed, but played occasionally (unlike almost 1k hours in D1). Then I come back later and it's free to play, the content I bought is gone and replaced by trash that's mostly locked behind paywalls. Throw in their "we refuse to allow you to play on Linux because fuck you" and characters and a world that make no sense and play like shit and there's nothing to go back to.
I played Destiny 2 when it first came to PC, before it was F2P. I had a great time with my friends, but we stopped before the first DLC was released.
Since then, I haven't paid close attention to the game, only when it got into the news every now and then, like when Bungie split with Activision and the game went F2P or when old content got removed.
What a nightmare this game has become. Even after I watched the video, I got no idea what you would have to buy as a new player, to actually play the game. Expansions, seasons, keys, and whatnot, not even talking about the cosmetic store or battle pass.
People clown on Blizzard and the current state of their games all the time, and rightfully so, but even those aren't as bad with the monetization, by far.
Blizzard is FAR worse. If you want to compare Destiny 2 to say WoW, you have to buy WoW for 12 months upfront to get below a yearly cost of full Destiny 2 content. And that does NOT include new expansions, which you have to pay separately for. This does not include all the microtransaction cosmetic stuff which tends to be actually worse, and game time token concepts for what amounts to pay-to-win stuff. If you stick to the official sticker price for Destiny 2 year of content, for $100 you basically get everything worth anything at all. Majority of cosmetics that are actually interesting are available in-game either free or for bright dust from the store (over time).
So, no, I'd say this is not even remotely similar.
Edit: to add to this; Blizzard vaulted a ton of content in WoW (originally in Cataclysm and then over time when they reused various pieces or blocked it in some ways); the grind treadmill in Blizzard is absolutely ridiculous compared to Destiny - consider if every expansion vaulted ALL of your existing gear and you had to basically start over. A lot of things are extremely expensive game-time-wise compared to Destiny - Destiny basically deprecated RNG in favor of fairly predictable crafting system and bad-luck protection; in WoW the "bad luck" protection comes in the form of Auction House with astronomical in-game price tags for loot worth actually having (pushing people to buy game-time tokens to auction those for ingame currency). So yeah, on the level of scumminess where sexy gatcha games are 10/10, Blizzard is like 8, and Bungie is maybe around 4.
Yep. I want to like Destiny 2, because I like the gunplay so much, but everything around it is total crap, so I just can't bring myself to go back. It's actually worse than some mobile gacha games, and that's saying something. Plus, I hate the fomo season passes and "story" content, which they only keep around for a short time, then "vault" forever. Not to mention the full on paid expansions they permanently vaulted, and the weapons they also vaulted.
Destiny 2's a clown show nowadays. They should've probably quit while they were ahead and started working on Destiny 3 already. At this point it's just a toxic monetization machine. I hate to say this, but they were better back when they were with Activision, and that's saying something. This is Activision we're talking about.
I played the entirety of Destiny 1. Was looking forward to the move to PC with the sequel but everything after was just disappointment after disappointment. Every season just felt like the final season of HIMYM, all buildup and no payoff.
In my time with the Destiny games, I couldn't really tell you what was happening with the story aside from some beats in the original campaign of Destiny 2, so I didn't even see buildup. And on top of that, the new encounters and such are just the same enemy types time and time again, so I couldn't really see a difference from one season to the next apart from the occasional boss fight.
I stopped playing Destiny 2 the seasons after Shadowkeep. Friends convinced me to try and come back when Lightfall dropped.
Spent money on Beyond Light. Spent money on Witch Queen. Spent money on Lightfall. Went through all the campaigns. Then they wanted to do some Witch Queen dungeon, and instead I was presented with yet another purchase to buy the dungeon pass or something like that. That's when I tapped out.